Body Modification and the “Internet of Things”

16 Horsepower, by Meghan Trainor, is a performance piece in which Trainor scans pieces of ceramic and graphite embedded with RFID tags to trigger different sounds from an audio database culminating in a series of tracks triggered by a RFID chip in her arm. This piece aims to help the audience understand and imagine the coming “Internet of Things” as well as emerging capabilities to modify the human body.

Trainor collaborated with ceramicist Michelle Anderson and programmer Stephen Koch. Anderson created 16 ceramic plumb bobs that walk a line between handmade and mass-produced objects. Koch built an application in Flash that allows her to rapidly and easily create and manage audio dense RFID projects. This piece will be debuted at the upcoming Ask the Robot show on June 4th, 2006.

Please join us for a special concert with Swiss artist Franziska Baumann (voice and sensorglove live electronics) and Matthew Ostrowski (laptop and P5 glove). Baumann and Ostrowski will each play solo, then in duo. The interactive technologies pioneered by these artists enable them to control articulations of their voices and computers in real time via gesture and movement. A variety of sensors connect their music to the real world of physical phenomena.Continue reading

Sonically Mapping the Body to Architecture

Music for Bodies is a research project linking the sonic mapping of human bodies to architecture, through a practical study of bioresonance and interface building. Its aim is to discover new methods of experimental music making, as well as make new music more accessible to the wider community. It is doing this concentrating on making music to feel rather than just listen to. Currently it is making Sonic Beds around the world; it recently won an Award of Distinction for Digital Music at Prix Ars Electronica:

“Kaffe Matthews’ Sonic Bed_London installation consists of a bed equipped with built-in loudspeakers; when installation visitors lie down on it, an endless loop of sounds washes over them. Due to their frequency and intensity, these sounds are perceived not only with the ears but also with the entire body in what is a very pleasant experience.Continue reading

Wading Compositions

Waves is a sound installation that uses buoys to connect wading pools in two different locations and create sound compositions generated by the energy of waves in a wading pool.

An accelerometer in each buoy measures the magnitude of waves through x- and y-axis position changes caused by the rocking back and forth of the buoy on the water’s surface. The accelerometer’s readings are converted into sound waves by a microcontroller connected to a SPEAKjet sound synthesizer IC. The SPEAKjet’s output is then amplified and sent to a speaker integrated into the buoy. Each buoy plays a electronically generated minimalistic tone that reflects the participant’s movements in the wading pool.Continue reading

This public discussion among artists Kate Armstrong, Bobbi Kozinuk, M. Simon Levin, Laurie Long, Leonard Paul, Manuel Piua, Jean Routhier, and curator Alice Ming Wai Jim will speak to “container culture” and the idea that the public sphere is rapidly being privatized and now reflects more on the movement of goods and capital than on the expression of individual rights. in[ ]ex, their interactive, city-wide media art project, will first be exhibited in connection with Centre A and the World Urban Forum in Vancouver, Canada in June 2006, and then in San Jose, California in connection with the Container Culture exhibition at ISEA in August.Continue reading

The Messenger Delivers a Golden Nica

The Messenger (1998) by Paul DeMarinis has been awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art by Prix Ars Electronica 2006. In The Messenger, email messages received over the internet are displayed letter by letter on three alphabetic telegraph receivers: a large array of 26 talking washbasins, each intoning a letter of the alphabet in Spanish; a chorus line of 26 dancing skeletons and a series of 26 electrolytic jars with metal electrodes in the form of the letters A to Z that oscillate and bubble when electricity is passed through them. Movie.

“The Messenger is an internet-driven installation based on early proposals for the electrical telegraph, in particular those made by the Catalan scientist Francisco Salvá. As in many of my works I examine the metaphors encoded within technology, especially lost or orphaned technologies and try to trace their origins, speculating on the way that mechanisms are the repositories of larger unspoken conceptions and dreams. In The Messenger I take the telegraph as a point of departure from which to examine the relationship between electricity and democracy, and how electrical telecommunication technologies have participated in our solidarity and in our isolation, in our equality and our oppression, in the richness of our experience and the uncertainty of our lives.” — Paul DeMarinisContinue reading

Monumental Music Box

SoniColumn is a high column-like cylinder that can be played by touch. Grids of LEDs installed inside the column light themselves on by the users’ touch and emit unique sounds. When a user cranks the handle, the column slowly rotates itself and plays the light patterns of the user’s touch.

In this (live) installation one can listen to the sounds of the universe originating from various sources. They have been collected by the artists’ group r a d i o q u a l i a (Honor Harger, Adam Hyde) in cooperation with RIXC, Center for New Media Culture, Riga. The recordings are coming from various radio telescopes. Additionally, during two days, there will be live feeds from the VIRAC radio astronomy telescope in Irbene (Latvia) which will be acoustically re-worked and interpreted live by the experimental musicians Clausthome (Latvia). VIRAC is the largest radio telescope worldwide (with a dish diameter of 32 meters) accessible for civilian use – thanks to RIXC’s continued efforts. During the cold war the KGB used the radio telescope for tapping into NATO’s and other military networks.Continue reading

Virtual Music Gate

Michael Markert’sm3, a virtual music gate, that sensors body movements in a space between two illuminated columns and processes the data in realtime to harmonic and rhythmic music. The art arises with the interaction of its users and their different and unique behavior in the gate: they can go through or stay in between, shake and bend their body in the gate, dance, stand still or crawl – and listen how their movements are turned into a sound experience.

The gate is operated by a matrix of distance sensors which triggers and alters different sounds. A Cocoa-based software processes the realtime MIDI-Events (harmonize & quantize) and routes the signals to a complex output setup of software synths and beat generators. (video) Currently at Cybersonica. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

New Interactive Interfaces

“My reason for irregular postings on Pixelsumo has been due to curating and coordinating the Cybersonica 06 Sonic Art exhibition. After a huge amount of work by the team, I can now happily say that the exhibition is now open and we have 12 truly great pieces installed in the gallery space. I highly recommend you get to London to check it out. Full documentation of all the work will be posted online, but I don’t want to ruin any surprises for now.

We have commissioned 5 new works, plus showing many existing works. The works have been selected for their exciting approaches to creative interactivity. They move beyond the ‘screen, keyboard, mouse scenario’ and respond to physical input, proximity, sound, kinetics, elapsed time and the surrounding environment.